Is Dylar a real drug? Find out here

Don DeLillo’s brilliant novel White Noise has finally received a film adaptation. Director Noah Baumbach took on the challenge after rereading the book in late 2019 and early 2020, he told Entertainment Weekly. Baumbach cast Adam Driver, whom he collaborated with in Marriage Story and While We’re Young, to play Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies in the 1980s. 

Interestingly, despite teaching a self-invented course about the much-reviled German, Gladney doesn’t understand the German language. As he learns the language in preparation for a talk, a catastrophic accident dubbed the ‘airborne toxic event’ disrupts his and his family’s lives. 

Gladney’s life is thrown into further turmoil after learning that his wife, Babette, has been secretly taking a pill named Dylar. 

Dylar is a fictional drug created by White Noise writer Don DeLillo

Denise, Jack’s stepdaughter, warns Jack about the effects of Dylar, but the family patriarch dismisses her concerns. Nevertheless, he has a colleague run tests to determine the drug’s uses. After receiving inconclusive results, Jack asks Babette’s doctor about the medication. 

The doctor reveals he hasn’t prescribed the pill to her. Eventually, Jack discovers that Dylar is a drug designed to treat thanatophobia, the fear of death. 

Babette got the experimental drugs by offering sexual favors to Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray discovered that the drug didn’t work but kept giving pills to Babette to maintain their sexual trysts. 

The scientist created Dylar to help humans confront death without fear; the drug had the opposite effect – it enhanced the fear of death. Gray and Babette, who’d taken the pill for months, developed an irrational fear of death, prompting Babette to distance herself from her family. 

Dylar is a fictional drug created by Don DeLillo. Thanatophobia is real, but there’s no drug to treat the fear of death. 

The drug doesn’t exist, yet it manages to shed light on the harsh reality of unsanctioned clinical trials happening worldwide. These illegal trials often damage the lives of the participants, who have no recourse after participating in unlawful experiments.